Travis Picking

How I learned to play ragtime guitar

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A couple of year’s back I was a 5-string banjo player, and for reasons I won't go into now, I stopped playing the banjo for a while. As luck would have it I had a half-sized Yamaha classical guitar kicking around that I had bought for my daughter when she was learning guitar at school. So to fill in the hole that not playing the banjo had left, I started to play around with the guitar.

I found the laziness of the nylon strings a nice change from the harsher sound of the steel banjo strings. I had developed some pretty good Scruggs style finger picking skills over the years so I started to apply what I knew to playing the acoustic guitar. What I really needed was some new songs to learn. Google+

My favourite guitar teacher

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Having figured out that I wanted to play ragtime guitar and figured out that using tablature software was going to be the most effective way to learn. I just needed to find someone with the same tastes in music.

After trawling around the internet looking for music to play I came across another offer, which like many I’d already seen before sounded to good to be true…”free guitar lessons”…"no cost"…"no strings attached"…"no music theory".

This didn't at first glance seem any different to any of the offers that I had seen before.

My favourite guitar

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After playing around with my daughters little Yahama classical guitar for about a year I decided that I wanted to play a really good guitar. The big decision was which one...there are so many guitar makers and such a range of prices.

I spent a lot of time in the local guitar shops trying out all sorts of guitars. I was lucky I guess in that I knew that I wanted something that would be more suitable for finger style playing...so I could ignore all the electric stuff, nothign with an inbuilt pickup or anything that required an amplifier.

My favourite tablature editor

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I have learned so many songs ove the years and then subsequently forgotten them, as I moved on and learned new songs. So I know from experience that I learn best when I “do” things and I “do” those things repetitively. So I need something that will help me learn in a repetitive way.

I also know I’m not really interested in anything more than basic music theory, I’m happy to know the basic chord formations and that’s it. I’m not interested in learning scales or ways to memorise all the notes on the fretboard. I have learned a bit theory but not really found it very useful. It is more likely that I haven't appreciated how to apply it.